#GuestPost - My tryst with crime fiction and its many faces by Debleena Majumdar

My tryst with crime fiction and its many faces

A few hours from Kolkata, the small town of Burdwan, lovingly embraced by the Banka river, was my annual summer haunt. Though, my real haunt was just up a set of gleaming marble stairs, cold to the touch, and warm even now, in memory, that opened out into a room where books peaked from all corners, packed in floor-to-ceiling, glass and wood bookshelves.

There, my summer afternoons passed in blissful blur as the gentle snoring from other sleeping souls kept pace with my excitement and the dappled light from the green, wooden, window shutters illuminated a new world to me. A world of crime books collected by my criminal lawyer grandfather.

Old, second hand, Arthur Conan Doyle, Saradindu Bandopadhay, Satyajit Ray and Agatha Christie novels, sourced from bookshops in Kolkata’s College Street, with their yellowed pages and personalized inscriptions, were a treasure trove for me as I discovered crime in its many faces. The first face, I discovered, was that of the “goyenda,” “the private eye,” a profession that immediately seemed the most alluring one to me.

The citizen detective

“I never guess. It is a shocking habit – destructive to the logical faculty,” said Sherlock Holmes and I was immediately hooked. Whether it was the logical deductions of Sherlock Holmes or the uncanny criminal-mind connections to her seemingly staid village life made by the frail but mighty Miss Marple, the eccentric brilliance of Hercule Poirot, the poetic eloquence of Byomkesh or the dashing decisiveness of Feluda, each such character, was a revelation to me.

I was sure that just by using the “little grey cells” while gently rocking in the armchair or thoughtfully knitting through a case, never missing a stitch, occasionally, making a dash to a few scenic and yet beautiful crime locations, was how crime was solved. And the grand denouement, where everyone was assembled, and each suspect was considered guilty till shown to be innocent, by the presiding detective, was how justice must be delivered. Much later, J.K. Rowling revived the private detective in her Cormoran Strike series under the name of Robert Galbraith, but the books, even though they were interesting, somehow lacked the charm of the earlier citizen detectives, for me. When I finished reading all the books that mirrored this genre, there was almost visceral feeling of having lost something I would never get back. The memory of reading these books for the first time. Thankfully, I discovered, soon, that crime writing, just like crime itself, had other faces.

The Inspector, the Crime Professional and procedural crime

I stumbled onto procedural crime fiction when my husband couldn’t see me moping over not having any new crime books to read any more and gifted me a copy of a Patricia Cornwell book, introducing me to the world of Dr. Kay Scarpetta and the field of forensics. Immediately, forensics topped my list of most-revered professions. Evidence now had new meaning, in DNA shades. Not just Patricia Cornwell, I discovered then the books by Ian Rankin, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. Each featuring crime professionals who were no less interesting characters than the citizen detectives I had been hooked onto so far. While they followed the law, the books also showed their own battle scars as they fought, not just crime, but also their own internal demons. The books also had a strong feeling of location with Scotland represented in vivid imagery by Ian Rankin just as later, prolific author, Anita Nair would do with her own crime thrillers featuring Inspector Gowda, and a changing landscape of Bangalore that was a character by itself in her crime novels.

When it comes to procedural fiction, of course, beyond just books, shows like Law and Order, 

Criminal Mind, The Mentalist and more, introduced various aspects of criminal procedure. While the legal aspect of Law and Order was fascinating to me, the behavioural profiling in Criminal Minds was no less intriguing though I found the excessive focus on serial killers, a bit disconcerting. I remember my grandfather speaking about phrenology, the ability to understand criminal tendencies from the shapes of people’s heads. Here was a way to delve into their minds, just through their behaviour. It seemed that intuition was back in vogue, with evidence. I was looking for more. And I found it, in the voice of the unreliable narrator.

The unreliable narrator: The real whodunit:

I guess the first unreliable narrator novel that I read was that by Agatha Christie, “The Murder of the Roger Ackroyd.” A classic twist. In the recent years, it has become quite a trend with “The Gone Girl,” incidentally, partly a take on Agatha Christie’s own mysterious disappearance, followed in quick succession by “The Girl on the Train, ”The Woman in the Window,” all by different authors, but focusing on a similar narrative of an unreliable narrator narrating the incidents leading up to a surprising climax. The latest such book I read was “When the Crawdads Sing,” by Delia Owens, featuring, not just an unreliable narrator, but also with startling hints about a real-life crime that happened many years back. Or maybe, it was just me trying to still play citizen detective. While each such book was an interesting read, the characters stayed one-off, some haunting, some forgettable. I was ready for more. And that’s when I discovered a new crime author, Keigo Higashino.

Keigo Higashino; mind-bending crime fiction:

Each of his few novels that have been translated into English are like a masterclass in crime fiction. Unreliable narrator, citizen detective, procedural crime, he seems to have attempted it all, in a riveting set of books that are as interesting for their plots as for their description of life in Japan. If you haven’t read of his works yet, “Devotion of Suspect X,” might be a good one to start with. As for me, I am waiting for more of his work to be translated into English, soon, unless I can learn Japanese fast, just for reading his books.

And then there was True Crime:

True crime has always inspired crime authors from the infamous Lindberg kidnapping which inspired Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” to the “O’Neill Case” which inspired “The Mousetrap.” I should also mention, “Alias Grace,” by Margaret Atwood. Not known strictly as a crime novel, though, it was inspired by the story of Irish immigrant to Canada, “Grace Marks” who found herself accused of murder. The author, wisely, refrained from giving the answer in black or white making it more about the exploration of human psyche and the prejudices of society. Today, true crime seems to be much in demand, whether it is story of the Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes, or serial killers in India, “The Deadly Dozen,” as assessed by author Anirban Bhattacharya, the name itself evoking memories of Satyajit Ray’s Dozen series, or stories of women criminals, “Queens of Crime,” by Sushant Singh and Kulpreet Yadav to the sensational cases of Aarushi Talwar and more. Real life, in all its darkness, seems to be inspiring a new range of not just writing, but also shows on Amazon Prime and Netflix.

Tomorrow, I am sure, I’ll discover some other genre of crime fiction. For now, as I turn author, I explore the world of the seemingly forgotten world of the citizen detective and craft a whodunit and more importantly, a whydunit, that asks whether murder is always, just that of human body. What happens when human identity is murdered? Or our ideas? For more on that, you have to read my book, “A Marketplace forMurder."

Let’s keep those little grey cells, working.